Join us on Tuesday, October 20 at 7pm for the launch of Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) featuring presentations by editor Antonia Majaca, and contributors Tega Brain, Brian Kuan Wood, and Gary Zhexi Zhang. 

When Inuit elders in Nunavut reported in the early 2000s that the sun was setting kilometers west of where it should and that the stars had shifted, climate scientists told them the Earth had not moved on its axis, and the elders turned out to be right. Warming air was producing temperature inversions that bent sunlight across the horizon, a refraction they already had a word for, qapirangajuq, taken from the adjustment a hunter makes when spearing fish through water. They had tracked a planetary change in the atmosphere more precisely than satellite monitoring, and their knowledge counted as evidence only once the models caught up.

The episode, narrated in Antonia Majaca's introduction to the edited volume Incomputable Earth, condenses a problem that has run through the Earth sciences since the cybernetic research of the 1940s: which knowledge of the planet counts, and what becomes of whatever cannot be rendered as data. Every new climate model, sensor network, and planetary data platform still arrives with the same promise, that the crisis will yield once it is measured finely enough. The book begins from the possibility that it will not. Climate breakdown may be a problem that algorithmic optimization and cybernetic planetary management cannot resolve, and computational frameworks, by converting the Earth's relations into extractable data, may reproduce the logics that produced the crisis.

This puts the Anthropocene hypothesis in question, along with the political epistemology it rests on. As climate breakdown erodes the historical record that every forecast depends on, algorithmic systems of classification and prediction extend their reach into the gap, and the meanings of "human," "nature," and "technology" become harder to take as given. The volume asks what forms of subjectivity and resistance take shape against this technoscientific governance of the planet.

The four contributors speaking at the launch approach these problems from different sites. Tega Brain starts from the word "ecosystem," which since Arthur Tansley coined it in 1935 has cast the environment as bounded, knowable, and available for optimization. She asks what that framing has edited out, from scientific forestry to the Grasslands Biome modeling project of 1968 and the ozone loss NASA's satellites missed. Gary Zhexi Zhang takes up finance as the planet's infrastructure of time: how catastrophe gets priced, who insures the insurers when the losses exceed them, and how movements such as DefundDAPL turn dispossession into financial risk.  In his conversation with Yuk Hui in the book, Brian Kuan Wood asks whether art can change how technology is conceived, rather than absorbing each new platform as a medium, and what happens when critiques of Western technological universalism are taken up by reactionary politics. Antonia Majaca turns to the Anthropocene hypothesis itself and to what it would take to reclaim abstraction from computational capture.

With contributions by Antonia Majaca, Marina Vishmidt, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Matteo Pasquinelli, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma, Juaniko Moreno, Yuk Hui and Brian Kuan Wood, Sara Garzón, Conrad Moriarty-Cole and James Phillips, Tega Brain, Victor G. García-Castañeda, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Michaela Büsse and Konstantin Mitrokhov, fields harrington and Katherine McKittrick, Luciana Parisi, Margarida Mendes, Mari Bastashevski, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Kevin Walker, Conor McKeown, and Daniela Zyman.

Incomputable Earth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) is available open access through Bloomsbury Collections, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

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